PortaBoom

PortaBoom: All the Doom you can handle on a 3" CD!

This document was last modified: Thursday, 19-Dec-2002 08:16:10 UTC,
and is maintained by { portaboom (at) portaboom.com }

Overview

PortaBoom is a standalone mini distribution of Linux.
PortaBoom's current goal is to allow people to play the game of Doom on
any Intel machine with a CD ROM drive, regardless of what operating
system is installed on the hard drive. Eventually, I'd also like to also
be able to add other games and application software using a modular
packaging system, which would let you choose what applications you want
to run. See the Notes page
for a big list of what I'd like to include in the project.

PortaBoom will boot from a CD ROM, and once booted, start a
framebuffer X server for gameplay and interaction with the system.
Another project which is being developed in parallel called tkBoom will provide the
graphical user interface (GUI) inside of X. My goal is to
fit all of the above onto a 3" CD-ROM (about 185Mb capacity) with
enough space left over for people to add a bunch of WAD files.

Boom is a port of the original Doom source code that was released by
id Software in December of 1997. The port of Boom that I'm
developing tkBoom on is called prBoom, and is located at http://prboom.sourceforge.net.
But in theory, it should work with any Doom port, some modification may
have to be made for command line parameters.

The hexadecimal number that md5sum outputs should match what's
posted here on the website. I usually just compare the first or last 4
digits, if something is wrong, then even those four digits won't match

To uncompress the bzipped image, use bzip2. Open an
MS-DOS window, and type:

bzip2 -d portaboom.iso.bz2

This will uncompress the file, and then you can burn the ISO image
with a CD ROM burning program that supports it.

If you are having problems downloading the ISO image, there is a
nice Unix utility called "wget" that can be used. wget is available on
most Linux/*BSD systems, and I've also linked in the "Downloading the
PortaBoom image" section of the User's Guide an FTP archive that
has Windows zipfiles of wget.

Misc

The GUI used in PortaBoom is available as a standalone application
called tkBoom. tkBoom is
written in Perl, with Perl::Tk providing the GUI controls.

I finally got a copy of the OpenGL version of PrBoom to work in
Linux, here's a few screenshots.

PortaBoom is developed and tested using Debian GNU/Linux. There's a PortaBoom FAQ available, which among
other things has troubleshooting info, tells people how to make changes
to the ISO CD image and burn their own custom PortaBoom CD's.

PortaBoom was put together using many different pieces of software;
see the CREDITS file for specifics, as well as any question about
licenses of the software in this package.

All of these webpages, and the scripts/programs created by me for
use in PortaBoom are copyright (c) 2001 by me, Brian Manning, and
released under the GNU GPL. Again, see the CREDITS file to see what
parts of other projects I used for this one.

You can contact me ( portaboom {at} portaboom.com ) if you have any
questions/problems with PortaBoom. I keep a diary on
Advogato, you can always get the latest project news there.